Flint and Roses (25 page)

We went to Albert Place to see in the New Year, my sister Celia, who had adamantly refused to risk herself outdoors, remaining throughout the entire evening on her sofa, so very much embarrassed by her swollen shape that even the presence of her kindly, down-to-earth father-in-law incommoded her.

‘Are you comfortable lass?' he asked her more than once, wanting, it seemed, to make a show of at affection, to move her closer to the fire or farther away from it, some gesture expressive of concern, but she could only reply, ‘Quite comfortable, thank you,' the sharpness of her tone implying, ‘Leave me alone. Don't draw attention to the sorry state I'm in. Don't stare at me.'

We drank what I felt sure must be an excellent wine, served, in Celia's wedding crystal, on a silver tray.

‘All the very best to you, lass,' Mayor Agbrigg said, remembering, this time, not to look at her.

‘I have told that girl a hundred times about these glasses,' she answered. ‘Jonas, have I not told her that they must be rinsed—really rinsed clean—but no, she dries them with the soap still on them. Jonas, you will have to tell her again, for, in these circumstances, you must see that I cannot.'

‘Yes, Celia,' he said quietly, not looking at her either, having no need, perhaps, of vision to know that her lower lip was trembling, her whole face quivering with the approach of fretful tears. ‘I'll speak to her in the morning. It can hardly be done now. Please do not cry over it. It is hardly worth so much agony.'

‘So you always say. You simply do not understand how these slovenly things upset me.'

‘You are quite mistaken, Celia. I understand exactly how much—and how often—you are upset. Are you tired now?'

‘Of course I am. I suppose you are thinking I would be better off in bed.'

‘Only if that is what you would like.'

But Mayor Agbrigg—the only other man in the room—was obliged to turn his back, making some excuse about mending the fire, before she would allow a completely expressionless Jonas to help her to her feet and lead her from the room.

‘Your daughter is very fanciful,' Aunt Hannah said. ‘One would imagine no other woman had ever been in her condition before.'

But, before my mother could answer, Mayor Agbrigg, putting down the fire-tongs, said quietly, ‘She's hardly a woman, Hannah—just a little lass, scared out of her wits. I hope my lad understands that.'

There was champagne at midnight—no one, now to complain about the glasses, since Celia, we had ascertained, was sound asleep—Mayor Agbrigg, gaunt in the flickering candlelight, raising his glass first to his wife: ‘Lets drink to your concert hall, Hannah—the grandest in the West Riding,' and then to Prudence, his quiet smile conveying, ‘And we'll pave the streets as well, lass, while we're about it, and shift the sewage.'

There was Jonas, his cool, narrow face giving no hint either of concern for Celia's condition, or of annoyance that she was managing it so badly, bestowing on me and Prudence the customary New Year's kiss, as correct and remote a brother as a husband, playing his role to perfection but with little feeling.

‘Happy New Year, sir,' he said to his father.

‘Aye—let's hope so,' the mayor replied, and we went home soon after. Mayor Agbrigg accompanying us to be the first foot across our threshold. Aunt Hannah waiting in the carriage while he carried inside the lump of coal for the hearth, the salt for our table, that would ensure our happiness and prosperity to come.

‘Happy New Year,' Prudence said to me, later, as we reached her bedroom door.

‘Yes, darling—the same to you.' But the radiance inside me had dimmed, leaving me cold, as scared, without exactly knowing why, as Celia, so that like her I needed the refuge, the bolt-hole, of my solitary bed and the release of tears.

We attended the public meeting, called some days later, at the Assembly Rooms, to put forward Aunt Hannah's plans—thinly disguised as her husband's—for the erection of the concert hall.

‘What have we got in Cullingford?' Mayor Agbrigg said bluntly, in no way abashed by this gathering of mill masters who could have bought and sold him ten times over. ‘We've got the mills and a few decent private houses. We've got the Mechanics Institute and these Assembly Rooms, and the new station, and that's about all. Folks that come here—and they're coming here now from far and wide—are saying Cullingford's not a town at all. They're saying its not much better than a navvy camp. Now, there's some as don't mind that, and some as do—there's some as don't take offence when they hear tell that Leeds is growing faster, and even Bradford's cleaner. But if we've got the muck, friends, we've got the brass to go with it—enough brass, I reckon, to set it all to rights.'

And although it was not the speech Aunt Hannah would have made herself, having had a great deal to say privately about the need for cultural improvement—preferring her own quotation ‘man does not live by bread alone'to Mr. Agbrigg's ‘Where there's muck there's brass'—the haggard, rough-spoken man she had married undoubtedly carried the day. A joint-stock company was formed, finance to be raised by the taking-up of ten pound shares, any deficiency or any additional costs to be met, it was discreetly understood, by that philanthropic gentleman, Mr. Joel Barforth. And henceforth my life was dominated by two issues, the concert hall—Aunt Hannah's insistence on Corinthian pillars, her flirtation with gas-lighting, her apparent disregard as to which orchestras, in fact, would actually play there—and Caroline's wedding.

It was to be in June, not at Listonby as one may have supposed, but in our own parish church, since at this stage it was Cullingford Caroline wished to impress, rather than the Chard tenantry. And so, throughout the bleakest January I could remember, I sat with her in the cosy back parlour at Tarn Edge, toasting ourselves by the fire and talking of what was to be the most splendid ceremony our town had ever seen.

‘You understand clothes, Faith,' she told me. ‘I've often noted it'; and when the guest lists were put away, the pattern books would come out, samples of fabric, pencil and paper for my sketches.

‘I'll go to London. You could come with me, Faith. In fact we could go to Paris, to that couturier you're always telling me of. Why not? Father will arrange it.'

But already in January there was a murmuring of unrest in France, hints that our own malcontents, the Chartists, were on the move again, threatening to carry their demands to Westminster and force them if necessary down the throats of any who were unwilling to listen.

‘They'll get nowhere,' Uncle Joel said, lighting one cigar from the embers of another. ‘These hot-heads, Feargus O'Connor and the like—they've got the men, and now, with the trains, they've got the means to move them wherever they're needed to demonstrate. But what's a demonstration? They tried to stop the mills from working back in forty-two—went on the rampage both sides of the Pennines, taking the plugs out of the engines so the looms wouldn't turn. And what happened? It was the demonstrators who ran out of steam in the end, same as the engines, except that we soon started the engines up again, and all they really achieved for their “brothers” was to lose them a few days pay. The Chartists will be no different. They may have orators who can tell them they should all have a vote, and that there should be a general election every year so they can practice using it—but they've got no organizers. There's no money behind them. We got the vote in thirty-two because men like me and Hobhouse and Battershaw and Oldroyd threatened to take our brass out of the Bank of England unless they gave it to us. What has Feargus O'Connor got to bargain with? He can call his mob out to break a few windows and throw a stone or two, but once they've rounded up the first half-dozen and shipped them off to Australia the rest will go home again. One man one vote indeed, and a secret ballot so the demon millmaster can't twist their tails on polling day. Well, I can't blame them for that. In their place I'd want the same—except I'm not in their place, and I've no mind to let my millhands choose my government for me.'

Yet it was rumoured that the London streets were beginning to be dangerous, that in Cullingford itself the hungry, the unemployed—the residents, one assumed, of Simon Street—were meeting in growing numbers to perform military exercises on the moors beyond Tarn Edge, a copy of the People's Charter in every pocket, a weapon of some kind in every hand, even hungrier men from Bradford, many of whom had been thrown out of work by the combing machines, coming to explain that the same thing was more than likely to happen to them. And to my relief, it was decided that Caroline must do her shopping at home.

I could not have said that Nicholas neglected me. We met as often as before, talked, smiled, our relationship apparently unaltered. And perhaps it was the very lack of change that troubled me, for, if it did not diminish, it did not grow; and I knew there were times when he held back from me.

‘Faith will know what I mean,' he still muttered now and then, but increasingly I could not understand him, was aware simply that something troubled him, my own senses, sharpened by panic, being quick to detect the slow building of a barrier between us, which I could not always bring myself to call Georgiana Clevedon.

I knew him too well for that—or thought I did—for, unlike Blaize, he had never sought the exotic in women, had spoken many times of the need to settle with a partner of one's own kind. He may, from time to time, have enjoyed the convenience of a casual mistress—in fact I knew quite well he had—as exotic or as garish as our local music-halls could provide, but in a wife—and Miss Clevedon, like myself, could only be available to him as a wife—such qualities must surely repel him. Nicholas was practical, shrewd, level-headed enough to choose a woman who was right for him. And since Georgiana Clevedon, ‘rare bird'of the wild wood'as Blaize had so aptly named her, was so very wrong, I was able for most of the time to convince myself that I was mistaken.

And in the moments when I couldn't—bare, solitary midnights that stripped me of hope and dignity—I concluded that if he wanted her, as he had wanted the actresses of the Theatre Royal, if it was passion, the reckless impulse of sensuality he had not managed to feel for me, then I would wait, closing my eyes and my mind to it, until it was over. I would say nothing, do nothing; I would be, as always, simply here when he needed me, making no demands, ready, like cool water, to heal him if she scorched him, ready to warm him if she proved cold, waiting, until the flame expired, to welcome him home, asking no questions, offering merely the strength of my love for him to lean on if she should weaken him.

But did he want her? Certainly no one but myself thought so, Caroline being too irritated by Miss Clevedon's open, encouragement of Blaize, and Aunt Verity, who knew her eldest son rather better, too amused by it, for either of them to connect her in any way with Nicholas. Was it merely my overwrought imagination, my jealousy extending to every woman he met, because I had not, it seemed, succeeded in making him love me? Had he, in fact, given any real indication of regard for her? None. But I would have been easier, I knew, had he leaned forward to catch a glimpse of her ankle, on her second visit to Tarn Edge, when she had mismanaged her skirt at the carriage-step—something he would have done automatically had it been any other woman—instead of staring stony-faced at the horse's legs, not hers. I would have been easier if, responding to her flighty, familiar manner, he had flirted with her, even treated her coarsely—anything. And I could not have explained, even to my mother, how his show of indifference where she was concerned stabbed me to the heart.

Nor did she appear to want him. Blaize, beyond question, was her choice, and a visit to Galton Abbey at the end of January convinced me that, as Caroline had said, a choice of some kind was necessary, for indeed the estate was much encumbered, the brother deep-dyed in his extravagance, and Miss Clevedon, without doubt, would have to fend for herself in life.

We went first, of course, to Listonby Park, even my mother, unutterably bored now with Cullingford and eager to be off again, twittering with excitement as the house revealed its graceful lines to us through the mist.

‘Caroline, my dear—how perfectly lovely!' And so it was, the Great Hall sparse, as Caroline had warned, but noble, the carved oak staircase rising majestically from it, the dining-room and drawing-room—added a mere hundred years ago—of such frail beauty, the baroque plaster mouldings so mellowed from the original white to a delicate cream in places, in others a gentle grey, that I, too, was reminded of fragrant petals at the season's end, and wondered how anything so exquisite could endure.

And when we had taken tea by the crackling, smoking fire—‘I must ask my father to advise me about that chimney'—had paced the Long Gallery up and down to admire the gilt-framed row of Chards, long dead, who would have turned over in agony in their weed-strewn graves had they suspected that any descendant of theirs could marry a tradesman's daughter, we were driven the three miles to the much smaller estate of Galton Abbey, to inspect a house of a very different order.

It stood at a bend of the River Law which had somehow escaped the pollution of our mills, a hurrying, sparkling water still running free beneath a rickety bridge, swirling itself around a row of old stones which the nuns, perhaps, in Tudor times, had used to cross the stream. There was a steep green hillside, ancient trees dipping their arms in the river, and the house, whose stones had heard the tolling of the convent bell, set in a slight fold of the land as if it had grown there, quite naturally, without the help of any man. And although I wanted to find it cold and dismal, like Caroline, I would have been enchanted, had I allowed it.

There was a hall here too, quite small, extremely dark, stone floors, stone walls, stone stairs leading to an open gallery, a feeling of age, a weight of memory and experience so strange, yet so haunting, so much in keeping with Miss Clevedon herself, that I was suddenly, fiercely grateful that only Blaize, not Nicholas, had found time to accompany us.